I've been a very active member of the Tcl community for more than 10 years now. It's beginning to become very clear to me that the Puppy community and the Tcl community would both have a lot to be gained from a strengthening of ties between the two groups.

Tcl has been a major component of Puppy since its birth, as far as I can tell. In fact, I first heard about Puppy when someone posted a page about it on the Tclers' Wiki http://wiki.tcl.tk/11951. For the last several years, the hottest area of development in the Tcl Community has been an application development, packaging, and deployment system called Starkit. http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html, created by Tcl luminary Jean Claude Wippler. An excellent paper about the technology, though a bit out of date by now, was presented at the 2002 Tcl Conference, by Steve Landers (of Perth, Australia). http://www.equi4.com/papers/skpaper1.html

Since this forum topic relates to Pups and stuff, I'd like to focus here on Tcl's answer for automated application delivery and update. One of the coolest features of the Starkit system is StarSync, which a Starkit user can use to automatically update the content of a Starkit-based application. http://www.equi4.com/264 Starkits and Starsync greatly simplify the deployment, installation, and updating of Tcl-based applications. The efficiencies of this system, would go a long way towards making Puppy even sleeker and faster than it is now, and keeping it that way.

I'd like to propose that Puppy move to this system for all Tcl-based applications. To do so would be so incredibly simple, that it's almost silly. First of all, the existing Tcl 8.4.9 subsystem of Puppy would be removed, then the single-file Tclkit 8.4.9 runtime would be put into /usr/bin, as well as a Starkit file containing the various Tcl extension libraries, such as Img, Snack, etc., needed to support the existing Tcl apps in Puppy. Then, file extension associations would need to be created for the .tcl and .kit extensions, so that files with those extensions would run on Tclkit. That's it! You're done. With such a change, Puppy will have saved a lot of space, and dramatically improved its capabilities in one fell swoop.

You can download the current single-file-binary release of Tclkit for Linux here http://www.equi4.com/pub/tk/8.4.9/tclkit-linux-x86.upx.bin. If you'd like to give it a whirl, just copy it to any directory on your system, rename it to something like "tclkit," make it executable, and download any of the cross-platform Starkits from the Starkit Distribution Archive, lovingly maintained by Steve Landers http://mini.net/sdarchive/. Then all you have to do is set the Rox run action for the .kit file to run with Tclkit, and you're off and running. Now any .kit files you download will 'just work' whenever you click on them. It's so easy.

With a coordinated effort between the Tcl folks and the Puppy mavens, Puppy could become a showcase for the power of the Tcl platform, putting the other bloated Linux distributions out there to shame in the process.

We have these pages developing in Tcl - showing how to get started in this useful language:

Internal Tcl Tutorial
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/TclTk

External tutor link
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/TclTutor

One way to show, develop and strengthen this relationship is in developing a tcl project for Puppy

The one that comes to mind is a configuration / control panel in Tcl. I have been attempting this with Ash and widgets but it is clear that a complete language would be more sensible (recently lost my work through not backing up . . . )

For long term flexibility and different presentation methods I feel the data is best stored in XML format

Is this the sort of thing that would showcase Tcl?_________________Puppy WIKI

Clif's TclTutor application is pretty good (I know him quite well), but it's pretty out-of-date, and doesn't cover Tk, as far as I know. There's quite an extensive and up-to-date tutorial available at http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/tcltutorial.html, on the other hand, but it doesn't cover Tk either.

The Tclers' Wiki has a page devoted to online tutorials at: http://wiki.tcl.tk/1304. It has an extensive list of links to various tutorial information.

And of course with Unleashed you can build your own custom Puppy very easily ...so can create a "tickle Puppy" to demonstrate the ideas.

The bottom line is the size of the ISO file. If you come up with a new concept for Puppy and have it ready to go in a 60 - 61M ISO live-CD, then we are "cookin with gas"...

I don't know if this is an overstatement or not, but Puppy is looking like he could be the saviour of tcl/tk, or at least a factor in a resurgence of interest.

P.S.
You may have noticed Pup 1.0.3 has ical, yet another tcl/tk app!

P.P.S.
I'm personally not all that keen on antialiased fonts, but that's what the majority expect, especially coming from XP. So, the antialised font feature of tcl/tk 8.5 is probably something we should aim for as soon as it looks stable and can run all the apps in Puppy.

Was John or someone else working on a small Python possibility for Puppy?
http://peace.wikicities.com/wiki/Python

The guiding philosophy for Puppy is "small and simple". The criteria for applications are:

1. They must be written in Tcl/Tk, C or C++.
2. GUI apps must use Xaw/Athena (Puppy actually uses Xaw95), Tk/Bwidget, GTK+ v1.2, GTK+ v2.2, or Qt v3.3.4 widget libraries.
3. They must be open source._________________Puppy WIKI

Lobster , try this ftp://jbn:jbnnoord@129.125.22.13/pupgcc/X11.tar.gz .
This is the bineary including examples and manual .
I use it as Qbasic . It has absolute dir path to /root/my-applications/.... .
This would be writeble for anyone . Greating Menno .

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